Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/417

 The Temple under the Ancient Empire. 327 the funerary offerings mentioned upon it. The tomb is thus consecrated to the use of some particular person, of an individual whose name is placed upon it, and who is exclusive owner of it and its contents to all eternity. In this temple there is no sign of such individual appropriation. Its total size is rather in excess of that of the largest mastaba yet discovered ; its materials are finer and its construction more careful. The bareness of the walls, therefore, can hardly be attributed to want of means on the part of the proprietor. It is true that in many tombs the decorative works have never advanced beyond the sketch stage ; but here, although the building is in a good state of preservation, not the slightest sign is to be discovered that any funerary ornamentation had ever been attempted. It is difficult to see how such an anomaly is to be accounted for except by the supposition that this is not a tomb, and was never intended to be one. An examination of the well leads to the same conclusion. In the mastaba the well is simply a vertical corridor of approach to the mummy chamber. Here there is neither sarcophagus nor any place to put one ; no enlargement of the well of any kind. But of the three parts into which the typical Egyptian tomb may be divided, the most important is the mummy chamber. It is the only one of three which is absolutely indispensable. It could, in itself, furnish all the necessary elements of a place of sepulture, because it could ensure the safety and repose of the corpse entrusted to it. Where there is no mummy chamber there can hardly be a tomb, strictly speaking. The anomalous character of these arrangements, supposing the building to be a tomb, disappears when it is looked upon as a temple. Its bareness and simplicity agree entirely with the descriptions given by Plutarch and the pseudo-Lucian of those early Egyptian temples which the one saw with his own eyes and the other knew by tradition. A well for providing the water required by the Egyptian ritual and by the ablutions of the priests would be in its proper place in such an edifice, while the similarity between its general arrangements and those of the mastabas may easily be accounted for by the inexperience of the early architect. The forms at his command were too few and too rieid to enable him to mark, with any certainty, the different purposes of the buildings which he erected. The architect of this temple seems,